“Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday before leaving Israel that he was ‘insulted’ by the Knesset vote on annexing the occupied West Bank, which took place while he was visiting the country this week,” Axios reports.

“Netanyahu has control over the majority in the Knesset and could have stopped the vote by taking it off the agenda or ordering the members of his party to vote against it. He chose not to in order to avoid a confrontation with his ultranationalist coalition partners.”

Wall Street Journal: “The group is freshly equipped after raiding arms depots late last year after rebels took Damascus and the regime’s army and its Iranian allies fled. It isn’t able to hold territory, but it is contributing to a sense of lawlessness that’s adding to the stress on the new state.”

“As the world’s attention turns to a looming showdown between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in South Korea, across the demarcation line, Kim Jong Un is floating the idea of a meeting with the US leader in his own way,” Bloomberg reports.

“There was a stony silence from Moscow a day after President Donald Trump criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin and slapped punishing sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies,” CNBC reports.

“Trump’s comments on Putin were notably widely absent from pro-Kremlin state media outlets such as TASS, Radio Sputnik and RIA Novosti’s news coverage on Thursday, with barely a mention of the criticism or canceled meeting.”